Category open source

Recently I came across a project by Salvatore Iaconesi whose The Cure website has open sourced all the clinical data from his brain tumour with the aim increasing his chances of survival and contributing data to the international research community. It’s a magnificent project that has already had an impact on debates around the role of the patient and data in cancer treatment. I very much see blood and bones as connected to this vision in terms of putting the patient in control of their data and enabling wider uses of it. There are divergences of approach, my project is less resolutely about open-source politics, I don’t think it will contribute to a cure, although it may contribute understanding to the ecologies of treatment that patients, diseases and medics are entangled in. I also feel blood and bones is a more traditional (if I can use that word) aesthetic project concerned with the collision of the bureaucratic and the personal, the material and the informational, in a way that draws upon conceptual traditions in the arts and wider digital culture.